Amazon.com Inc. has made its electronic-book reader, Kindle, available in Japan, whose e-book market has grown sharply in the past few years. Amazon is confident of getting into the Japanese market, which has been dominated by cell phones in terms of electronic reading devices, ...

Speaking on the sidelines at the CEATEC technology conference in Chiba on Friday, Takahito Iguchi made a bold statement: “We will make a new environment.” Iguchi is the CEO of TonchiDot, the company behind Sekai Camera, a much-hyped program that lets users digitally tag ...

Thousands of goose-stepping troops, rumbling rows of tanks and floats celebrating China’s achievements paraded proudly in front of Tiananmen Square last week, all intended to convey the message that Beijing has everything under control. However, there’s everything but control on the Internet. Ironically, behind ...

The theme for the 2009 Tokyo Game Show is “Game, it’s so energetic!” Ironic, as the energy for this year’s show was less palpable than for previous ones. Organized by Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, Tokyo Game Show is the premier domestic industry event, ...

This year’s overhyped IT concept is cloud computing. Also called software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing is when you run software over the Internet and access it via a browser. Both Google Docs and salesforce.com’s customer management software are examples of this. Last ...

Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” music-technology event last week was closely watched by Apple fans in Japan, where many consumers have anointed the iPod and iPhone as their music players of choice over the past few years, even over homegrown competitors such as ...

Facebook recently made changes to its service agreement in order to make members’ data more accessible to other computer users. Amuse, Inc. announced last week that hackers stole credit-card information from about 150,000 clients. Hackers broke into the social network Twitter’s system and stole ...

For a long time, the Japanese publishing industry was in the dark about the Google Book Search Library project, the ambitious endeavor by the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant to create a vast online library by scanning millions of books. Google announced the start ...

Early last month, Mixi CEO Kenji Kasahara came under intense pressure. That was on the day that his company, Japan’s biggest social-networking operator, announced its financial results and forecast for the year: Its profit would fall by 15 percent from the previous year, the ...

On April 17, the district court of Stockholm issued its verdict in the copyright infringement case of the torrent tracking Web site The Pirate Bay, whose managers and another associate were accused of facilitating the illegal downloading of music, movie and video-game files. The ...

The Web has been praised for taking publishing to new heights, but it’s also pioneered new ways for people to connect and reconnect. In Facebook, Mixi, MySpace and hundreds of other large and small online communities, we’re learning new modes of socialization. And, as ...